Often it feels like just a matter of time before BuzzFeed expands beyond Facebook (FB), beyond Twitter, (TWTR) beyond earth, and starts launching extraterrestrial outposts in such places as Jupiter, Venus, and Mars. It’s just a matter of time before pods of cheerful, young BuzzFeed staffers are scattered across the solar system, cranking out must-read lists like, “47 Reasons to Love Living on the Bright Side of the Moon.”
BuzzFeed’s appetite for far-flung conquests can at times seem insatiable and inevitable. On Sunday, for example, BuzzFeed announced that in the months ahead, the company will use a $50 million injection of Series E funding from Andreessen Horowitz to fuel a new wave of expansions. Among other things, BuzzFeed will invest more in its editorial news team. They will grow internationally with new outlets in India, Germany, Mexico and Japan. They will build a test kitchen and launch a food lab. They will incubate new technology and prowl for possible acquisitions. And they will launch “BuzzFeed, Off BuzzFeed,” which sort of sounds like an in-house detox center for meme-addled staffers, but in reality has something to do with experimental content distribution. And that’s not all.
In what is arguably the site’s most extravagant gesture to date, BuzzFeed announced on Sunday, that it will also be forming a new division called BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, designed to master the movie business. Per the release: “Ze Frank will lead the division as President of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures and will expand to focus on all moving images from a GIF to feature film.”
And they will do it all with…$50 million?
To date, as far as I can tell, no reputable economists have published any peer-reviewed studies attempting to quantify the median investment required when jumping from a “GIF to feature film.” But it’s probably not a small number. What does $50 million get you in the modern, blockbuster-driven movie business? For starters, less than a third of the production budget of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Translation: a few CGI bananas.
During its brief lifespan, BuzzFeed has succeeded in part by pioneering a new, short-form genre of meme-powered, Reddit-inspired, photo-aggregation lists that are not only more fun than a barrel of monkeys but also cheap to manufacture in bulk and essentially free to distribute. For a form of popular, mass entertainment, the costs are incredibly low. The challenge for BuzzFeed moving forward is that as it pushes into other traditional genres of media–whether longform journalism or longform movies– the costs of production will ratchet up significantly.
At the same time, BuzzFeed will increasingly find itself in direct competition for talent, technology, and ideas with deep-pocketed rivals. For the likes of Rupert Murdoch, $50 million is what a single, thriving cable network like, say, Fox News throws off in profits every couple of weeks. That’s not war-chest money, in other words. It’s more like yacht money.
Which is not to say that BuzzFeed won’t someday “lol” and “wtf” its way to the kind of scale currently enjoyed by the multi-billion-dollar companies at the top of the media food-chain. Those conglomerates, in fact, are now in the process of slimming down after years of binging on mergers, acquisitions, and all-around gluttony. Maybe someday, they’ll meet in the middle. But for BuzzFeed, the journey from GIF to feature film is likely to be a long and difficult one.
“Lots of companies look like toys in their early growth days and that’s sort of the pitch here,” Paul Kedrosky said Monday on Bloomberg TV. “But taking it from this point to something much bigger and more profitable is very difficult to see. I struggle to figure out how that works from here.”
Two words: BuzzFeed Pluto.
